Rae Stern

CRISTINA CÓRDOVA 

ON NATURE/NURTURE

“I was born into a household that both challenged and upheld gender archetypes. This simultaneity created a fluid identity in my creative perspective that has moved me to engage with a wide spectrum of narrative embodiments from the sexually untethered and universal to the absolutely feminine. I am human, I am Puerto Rican, I am a woman. Each of these breaks into a thousand fractals that create the prism through which my work comes into the world.”

GISELLE HICKS

ON NATURE/NURTURE

“My creative interests and curiosities were nurtured early on by my parents and teachers. I was exposed to a variety of visual and performing arts growing up with my mom who enjoyed learning about and collecting art, while my dad was a big proponent of Joseph Campbell’s ‘follow your bliss’ mantra. He thought, if you do something you love, doors will open. What a gift to offer your child. My announcement that I wanted to study art, particularly ceramics, was met with encouragement. I came out of the womb driven to achieve, so my parents must have trusted that I would figure out a way through a career in the arts.

Fortunately, the path had been paved by some incredible makers that continue to serve as inspiring models  – Ruth Duckworth, Lucie Rie, Marguerite Wildenhain, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hess, Viola Frey, Agnes Martin. I’ve been fortunate to have as many wonderful male mentors and teachers – David McDonald, Errol Willett, and Doug Casebeer to name a few. However, it is the female mentors – Beth Lipman, Leslie Ferrin, Linda Sikora, Ann Currier and Andrea Gill – that gave me space, support and permission to develop my voice as a woman, teacher, and full-time studio artist.”  – Giselle Hicks, 2020.

LAUREN MABRY

LAUREN MABRY ON NATURE/NURTURE

“As a young woman, I was emboldened to embrace my natural strengths – an independent, competitive spirit, believing that I could achieve whatever I set out to do. Born with a gift and a drive, I have made it this far because I have been nurtured by many strong women in my life, starting with my mother who always encouraged me to follow my passion for art. Along the way, my female educators never hesitated to push me even when I was struggling – Jane Shellenbarger, Cary Esser, Sanam Emami, Gail Kendall, and Margaret Bohls. My career has been continuously shaped by females, gallerists, and curators like Leslie Ferrin and Catherine Futter, who create exhibition opportunities, connections, and help put my work in important collections. Of equal importance are the many women artists who, although I haven’t known personally, have influenced my voice a great deal – Betty Woodman, Viola Frey, Karen Massaro, Lynda Benglis and many more. I am so grateful to have all of these women who have led by setting the example.”

ANINA MAJOR

DIRECTOR NOTES ON ANINA MAJOR

We first met in 2018 when she appeared in our doorway having just arrived to participate in a three week residency in the Artist for Assets program located above us in Building 13 on the MASS MoCA campus. Our quick friendship grew when she decided to stay in North Adams for the year at 36 Chase & Barns Artists and Art Historians Residency, culminating in a show The Rhythm of Hybrid Interactions nearby in MCLA’s Gallery 51. She is currently working at Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and like so many artists, she has work on view in several concurrent exhibitions currently closed to the public.

Drawing inspiration from her cultural background, she continues to work in ceramics using techniques that draw from Bahamian plaiting and indigenous weaving. The objects and installations make connections to contemporary issues. In her future hopes and dreams, she plans to trace her ancestry through weaving and maybe even set new roots in North Adams.

ANINA MAJOR ON NATURE/NURTURE

“My practice exists at this intersection of craft, commerce and identity. Particularly as it relates to home being defined by a familiar cultural lineage. As a naturalized American, to maintain a connection I have adopted straw weaving, practiced by my grandmother as radical inquiry and artistic expression. This indigenous form of weaving, known as plaiting is a salient indicator of a tradition passed down from my enslaved West African ancestors. Yet it is one of the most underrated manifestations of Bahamian artistry due to its decreasing economic demand. Every year, I witness the few straw objects left by my grandmother deteriorate and notice the parallels between this depreciating craft and the disintegrating object. My work contends that these woven baskets are physical manifestations of my inheritance and are the ideal metaphor to carry forth my lineage, figuratively and literally. The fragility of re-establishing the significance of plaiting beyond its monetary value and acknowledging it as an intrinsic factor in the formation of identity becomes evident with the use of ceramic material. In process it evolves to a language capable of recording my migratory experiences through a postcolonial lens.”

CRYSTAL MOREY

ON NATURE/NURTURE

“I grew up in Northern California of the 1980s and 90s, influenced by the movements of free speech, feminism, and living close to the land. My ideas of gender were rooted in feminine strength, connected to the power of nature. As my love for nature, equality, and art have grown, becoming my own, I have realized the historical absence of female voices depicting our bodies and experiences. Now, as a woman and an artist, I want to reclaim the art historical nude with its powerful beauty, relationship to the natural world, and the ability to share a new, contemporary narrative.

Reclaiming the feminine body as containing autonomy, self-determination, and strength are important in my creations. Pulling from traditions of classical beauty and realism, while also using exaggerated gesture and body positivity is very important. I am continually looking to create figures with emotional strength, luscious sexuality, and evocative forms that share a kind of raw power and self-containment.”

 

KADRI PÄRNAMETS

DIRECTOR’S NOTES ON PÄRNAMETS

Kadri Pärnamets and I met through the social network of the artists the gallery represents, which is often the way I’ve begun relationships that develop long term. This “net” is actually a form of nurturing that connects one artist to another, first through their professional art practice, and over time, growing to become increasingly personal.

We got to know Kadri during the summer she spent at Project Art working in the studio with Sergei Isupov in 2008. Both artists produced independent works, and while working side by side, they also created a collaborative series. Kadri’s biomorphic forms and Sergei’s painted details merged along the lines of the surrealist game, exquisite corpse, when one artist starts and the next one adds, and is something that came naturally to these two artists. Their international lives in Estonia and USA and time working at international symposia and residencies provided time for collaborations, and now with the dual residencies, they work side by side tackling domestic projects in both of their home environments.

During the course of Nature/Nurture, suddenly in quarantine with their daughter, Roosi who was schooling from home, Kadri’s work in the family studio became focused on a series of small works and collaborative home projects at Project Art.

Due to the extended run of Nature/Nurture, we have been given the opportunity to reflect on paths taken, connections made and shared experiences in our now weekly series of FC News & Stories with each issue focusing on an individual artist in the exhibition. The ON NURTURE statements written by each artist acknowledges family, artist mentors, education and, particularly for Kadri, recognition of nature as inspiration and metaphor for her sculptures. Focusing our attention on “small matters”, Kadri’s sculptures of roots and painted details of common insects and pollinators recognize the foundation of our ecosystem and our inter-dependence – something that has become more obvious to us all as we observe the impact of global warming and the spread of the coronavirus.

ON NATURE/NURTURE

“My new work is drawn from my roots. Focusing on the little simple things in nature, like bugs and their sounds, these things give us an understanding of time and space. Wherever I hear the sounds of the first fly in the spring or a mosquito buzz in summer I’m reminded of how important it is to keep balance in our surroundings and to appreciate the annual life cycles that begin from most ordinary and common things. Small matters.“

LINDA SIKORA

LINDA SIKORA ON NATURE/NURTURE

“It was Gertrude Stein, and then scholars of Stein and Hannah Arendt, who influenced my understanding of social space, political space and the household. One example is an essay about Stein and her experience of the private, household space as the space where the mind is truly free (the most creative and masterful). In this, Stein inverts conventional ideas wed to gendered, privileged (early Greek) structures that typed the household as utilitarian (a place of women, necessity and restriction),  in contrast to the public (male) platform as the only space of freedom. This is a powerful assertion and essential to understand when we consider creative work that is either inspired by or, destined to operate in domestic spaces. When one takes home a creative work– one is really taking home one’s own imagination. And, if we follow Stein’s thinking, we are taking our imagination home to the freest space of our mind. Each time we engage this ‘work’, it reflects our imagination back to ourselves (anew). This is one way we stretch ourselves, one way we change – a form of nurture.

In the home-space, service, storage, and display are obvious realms for ceramic pottery form to operate. This trio has become a framework for recent inquiries into specific subjects (teapot, kettle, crock, box) and the groupings they generate, such as the extended series in the Nature/Nurture exhibition. I have been using these realms to think more specifically, about what ceramic work in this genre is trying to do. To serve (provide, assist), to store (hold, contain, preserve), to display (present, offer, remind) –are gestures in the world. To serve, to store, to display are gestures that occur on a small scale: individual, household level. And, they also occur on a large scale: societal, global level. Things and gestures occur in private spaces or highly-visible places. Service, storage and display impact the way use becomes leveraged against (an object’s) appearance and subject to influence how it is valued, it’s relevance or, whether it remains meaningful. Inquiry into these realms also connects to ideas about the household as a space of freedom. Such associations might influence the way we embody or make meaning of complex conditions …like existence or time for example: consider a teapot that is ‘performative’ over a short, finite duration (until the tea is drained), and the storage jar – in which stillness and silence can actively hold for durations longer than a life.”

RAE STERN

DIRECTOR NOTES ON RAE STERN

We continue our series of news and stories about the twelve women artists in NATURE/NURTURE focusing our eighth in the edition on Rae Stern.

Rae Stern and I met through Ceramic Top 40, the 2013 survey of contemporary ceramics organized to address the absence of documented, comprehensive, media specific surveys during that time. With support from Belger Arts, the exhibition was presented at their newly opened, expansive space in Kansas City, MO and again, in 2014 at the newly opened gallery of Office of the Arts, Harvard Ceramics.

Stern’s work in CT40 show featured Web Souvenirs, a collaboration with Aya Margulis that used printed transfers on plates of images sourced from the internet. Attending the opening began a relationship with Belger Arts that led to the long term artist residency and enabled her to tackle the process of using photography, porcelain and lithopanes. The fall exhibition, In Fugue presented the resulting 30 vignettes as a complete installation with images sourced from the community. Selected individual works are featured in Nature/Nurture at Ferrin Contemporary and an online exclusive on ARTSY.

Nature/Nurture, like Ceramic Top 40, is a survey exhibition that explores and documents the work of a group of artists at a specific moment in time. The nurturing role of survey exhibitions becomes more evident as careers evolve.

Due to the extended run of Nature/Nurture, we have been given the opportunity to reflect on paths taken, connections made and shared experiences in our now weekly series of FC News & Stories, each issue focusing on an individual artist in the exhibition. The ON NURTURE statements by each artist acknowledges family, artist mentors, education, and, particularly in Rae Stern’s case, recognition of the importance of foundation support and artist residencies in the development of new works by individual artists.

Read more on The CERAMIC TOP 40 exhibition & The NATURE/NURTURE series.

RAE STERN ON NATURE/NURTURE

Spending time at American art residencies has impacted my professional growth in unpredictable ways. Coming from a non-ceramic background, residencies allowed me to immerse myself in open-end exploration and experimentation with the medium. As an immigrant, spending time at these unique transient ecosystems offered an opportunity to build a professional network despite having graduated from a foreign school. One of the best experiences was the recent year-long residence at Belger Arts, KC, MO, during which I created the exhibition “Rae Stern: In Fugue”. The close mentorship from Evelyn Craft-Belger and the Belger Arts team was an empowering vote of confidence in my conceptual body of work as well as an unparalleled opportunity to step up the scope and technical complexity of my work.

LINDA SORMIN

DIRECTOR NOTES ON LINDA SORMIN

Due to the extended run of Nature/Nurture, we had the opportunity to reflect on paths taken, connections made and shared experiences in our weekly series of FC News & Stories with each issue focusing on an individual artist in the exhibition. The ON NURTURE statements written by each artist acknowledges family, artist mentors, education and for Linda Sormin, a growing context for her work “Reshaping Rage” conceived of and titled prior to COVID19.

My first introduction to Linda was in 2008 when she started teaching at RISD but I didn’t fully understand her work until I experienced it in person when I met her at Greenwich House Pottery to see her solo installation, My Voice Changes When I Speak Your Language. Arriving with deeply held preconceptions of tightly controlled pedestal presentations, my viewpoint was permanently altered by seeing her bold, ambitious and gravity-defying use of the earthbound material – clay.

“Sormin practices the art of the slow burn– both literally… and also figuratively, in that her sprawling installations communicate a carefully controlled fury. It is a vivid, visual chamber music, in which not a single note of pragmatism, didacticism or functionalism can be heard… The visitor is encouraged to wander through this ceramic wonderland as if through an ancient forest.” –Glenn Adamson

We are pleased to announce that Linda Sormin will be included in MASS MoCA’s upcoming exhibition Sculpture and the Possibilities of Clay opening fall 2021 curated by Susan Cross, senior curator.

LINDA SORMIN ON NATURE/NURTURE: RESHAPING RAGE (WHEN REVENGE MAKES PERFECT SENSE)

The intricate hand-work in my visual art process embodies traditional Buddhist practices in Thailand & Laos.  Living in both countries during my 20’s, I joined groups of women who created floral floats & wreaths in preparation for rituals and festivals.  Mounds of fragrant material – orchids, marigolds, jasmine blossoms, bamboo leaves, string and gold leaf – surrounded us as we pieced together objects that offered intricacy, meaning and function beyond the everyday.  My art practice is motivated by sensorial and poetic use of natural and found materials.

I experiment with the use and behavior of ceramics in the context of contemporary life and visual art.  Ceramics is alert and nimble, evolving with the changing needs of cultures and communities. Clay is most familiar as a material used in traditional making.  While deeply respecting these traditions, my curiosity and passion for working in clay spring from the mischief and delight I experience in inviting it to misbehave.

Toying with the rules of craft, I engage hands-on skill as language, subverting “fluency” and “correctness” in making.  I explore the “wrong” way of doing things, striving to decolonize ceramic language – to open up new possibilities for ceramic encounters.

I roll and pinch clay into forms that melt, lean, lurch and dare you to approach. Shards, souvenirs, test tiles and trash are collected into ceramic structures. Nothing is thrown away (this immigrant lives in fear of waste). Old yogurt is used to start a new batch. What is worth risking for things to get juicy, rare, ripe? What might be discovered on the verge of things going bad?

I push clay bodies beyond temperatures they are able to withstand.  In extreme heat, forms twist and slump – upright linear elements sway and “lose” their shape.  In my sculptures, I stop just before structure gives way – pausing at the point between construction and collapse.

Fracture, “unbuilding” and re-situating ceramics are part of my process in creating large scale, site-responsive installations.  Aggressive physical interactions with material and form embody the ways that humans de-construct and re-shape our lives in situations of upheaval, change and trauma.  My sculptures and installations alternately hold and release these points of tension and precariousness.

The title of my sculpture in this exhibition, Reshaping Rage (when revenge makes perfect sense), is drawn from a recent New Yorker interview of Judith Butler.  I am inspired by how Butler talks about rage as something that can be crafted:

“People in the world have every reason to be in a state of total rage. What we do with that rage together is important. Rage can be crafted—it’s sort of an art form of politics. The significance of nonviolence is not to be found in our most pacific moments but precisely when revenge makes perfect sense.” – Judith Butler Wants Us to Reshape Our Rage

The New Yorker, interview by Masha Gessen February 9, 2020

The New Yorker Interview: Judith Butler Wants Us to Reshape Our Rage

MARA SUPERIOR

DIRECTOR NOTES ON MARA SUPERIOR

In the works presented in Nature/Nurture, Superior’s political views are expressed front and center. The large-scale porcelains use the format of Renaissance-era storytelling platters with wide-rimmed borders functioning as frames. Carefully placed medallions and miniature objects in relief are emblazoned with messages delivered in delicately, hand-painted, calligraphic, heavily-laden serif fonts. Whether she is channeling mother nature or calling on higher powers to impact the coming election, Superior speaks loudly in large, all caps type, using the language of decorative arts to shout her beliefs in beauty and humanity’s inherent goodness.

Originally a New Yorker, Mara has been living and working in Western Massachusetts since the 70’s. Her life and work are an ode to Western culture. While embracing traditional values of home and beauty, her work is from a modern perspective with a feminist nod to sensuality and pleasure. Whenever possible, she spends leisure time wandering the museums of the world– in person. But, now, quarantined at home, she is touring these museums virtually, attending online classes, watching zoom lectures, and enjoying her vast library of gorgeous art books. She shares these moments along with the slow progress of painting her next work All American on her Instagram feed.

Superior met Leslie Ferrin at the beginning of her career. Both were in school, Mara at UMASS in the MAT program, Leslie at Hampshire College. Mara’s husband, Roy Superior, was Ferrin’s professor. They shared studios as artists, founding Pinch Pottery in Northampton, followed by East Street Clay Studios (Hadley, MA). Their intertwined, four-decade-long careers have weathered many changes and challenges over 40 years. Roy passed away in 2013, truly a renaissance man, an artist, sculptor, musician and beloved professor for 40 years spending 16 years at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Mara continues to live in the New England farmhouse they slowly renovated together, surrounded by the furniture he built to hold her works, his drawings, their library and his “wunderkammer” collections. The studio filled with hand made, hand tools, is still intact.

Superior’s artwork features ideas gleaned from research and travel, uniting all her interests in thematic approaches to specific content. Like her exuberant country garden, her work is always a beautiful mix of heirlooms and hybrids, free-ranging and grafts that come from strong rootstock. Her mashup mix of source material is delivered as stylized interpretations through images and didactic text. Using a combination of folk traditions, references to the classics of Western art, she infuses not so veiled socio-political messages from a contemporary perspective. Her deep love of ancient Greek, Roman, Asian antiquities, European and Early American pottery and ceramics – these objects become the subject matter of collection platters that feature miniature versions of her coveted favorites.

“My passion for Art History and the History of the Decorative Arts has informed my work throughout my career. I seek to create beauty through the reinterpretation of historical inspirations synthesized with my own visual vocabulary and contemporary views. The resulting objects are rooted in the historical continuum.”

MARA SUPERIOR ON NATURE/NURTURE

“I was nurtured and encouraged to develop my imagination by my family and art teachers all the way through graduate school. Further enrichment came by way of my extraordinary good fortune to have been married to Roy Superior, a wonderful Artist and Professor of Art.

Over the course of my career, ceramics, art schools, museum curators and society have evolved to become more inclusive. Barriers have disintegrated, and currently, it feels as if ceramics is female-empowered given that so many of the magazine editors, gallerists and many curators are women.

For my entire professional career, I have been blessed to have only one brilliant and visionary female art dealer, Leslie Ferrin, of Ferrin Contemporary. Leslie has always encouraged my best work, offered me opportunities, and given me valued professional advice.

The choices that I employ regarding my own work for materials, content, palette and ornament might, by historical standards, be considered feminine work by nature. That label has never been a hindrance to me. I have had a very privileged life and career as an artist and am grateful for it all.

My piece in Ferrin Contemporary’s exhibition Nature/Nurture, Only One Planet Earth, is a commentary on the current predicament mankind is facing — Climate Change — and what to do about it. I can only hope that this universally shared crisis will bring out the best in us and bring humanity together to find remedies.”

 

TRICIA ZIMIC

DIRECTOR NOTES ON TRICIA ZIMIC

We continue our series of news and stories about the twelve women artists in Nature/Nurture focusing on Tricia Zimic. We first met in the fall of 2018, as she arrived for a workshop at ProjectArt  given by master figural sculptor, Sergei Isupov. Known as an accomplished painter, Zimic was inspired to work in porcelain after a visit to Dresden and the massive Meissen menagerie. Further research and visits to the extraordinary collections at the MFA Boston and Wadsworth Atheneum led to Sins & Virtues, a series of related paintings and porcelain sculpture. The series draws inspiration from Meissen’s Monkey Orchestra, satirical figurines of fashionably dressed monkeys imitating human behavior. Zimic uses this tradition of anthropomorphism to deliver contemporary social commentary from a female perspective. Selected works from the series are introduced in Nature/Nurture and featured online in an exclusive on ARTSY.

TRICIA ZIMIC ON NATURE/NURTURE

“My porcelain sculpture series “Sins & Virtues” harkens back to the original Meissen masterworks by Johann Joachim Kändler, when men were the only artists recognized and producing great works. My work is the contemporary female extension of the Meissen heritage with a sensual touch. The Seven Deadly Sins and Virtues are a timeless quest for all storytellers, but women have been the primary vessels for passing stories down from one generation to another. Having started originally as a book illustrator, telling a story in clay not only comes naturally to me, but is a tradition and a legacy.”